Chapel's revival answers prayers

November 12, 2006|By Pat Whitney, The Madison Courier

As a child, while visiting her grandparents' North Madison, Ind., farm Josie Fox often walked through the nearby St. Patrick's Cemetery with her mother, aunt and grandmother on their way to Sunday mass. They would trek from stone to stone, reading the names of the Bumens, Steinbergers and other ancestors.

"What's going to happen here after we're gone," lamented her grandmother, Josephine Steinberger, admiring the mortuary chapel, built between 1854 and 1874.

Little did Fox know that she would one day be responsible for restoring the chapel to its original condition.

Earlier this year, Josie and her husband, Geoff Fox, came back to Indiana from San Jose, Calif., where they have lived for 25 years. While here, they attended a meeting about the chapel's condition.

"We were planning to spruce up the chapel," said Dave Dionne, cemetery committee chairman. "But all we were going to do was to patch and paint. That's all the money we had."

The Foxes had other ideas.

Josie Fox, who studied art history in graduate school, also had become interested in genealogy, including information on her great-grandfather, foreman of the Madison-Indianapolis Railroad.

The couple decided to give the structure a much-needed face-lift.

"We undertook the project because we have a strong interest in historic preservation," Geoff Fox said.

Josie Fox hired Camille Fife of The Westerly Group to research the chapel's history before the restoration project. She contracted Helming Construction Co. of Jasper, Ind., known for its expertise restoring church steeples, to do the work.

"The restoration project started Sept. 9 and is slated to be a two- to-three-month project," Dionne said. "Josie's having the chapel restored to its original condition, including replacing the roof, putting in new box gutters and removing particularly invasive trees."

A Frenchman, Hippolyte Dupontavice, built the structure Fox considers the focal point of the cemetery. Dupontavice's remains and those of a pastor from St. Michael's Church, Joseph Petit, are buried beneath the original stone floor at the foot of the small marble altar.

The octagon-shaped chapel was originally constructed of brick with a wood-beam ceiling, plaster walls, stone floors and slate roof tiles, intricately placed in the form of a cross on the sides of the roof. A 10-foot-tall crucifix hangs in the chapel's interior.

According to Steinberger family lore, the crucifix was a gift from the French government to the Centennial Committee in Philadelphia in 1876. It was purchased for the chapel by French native Mary G. Seymour Prenatt, a lifelong member of St. Michael's Church.

The crucifix was done by Franz Mayer & Co., a German company still in business today.

According to historical accounts, the chapel was used for prayer before burial. Other times, it served as a holding place for a coffin that couldn't be placed in the ground during inclement weather.

Decades after Fox had walked through the cemetery as a child, the mortuary chapel fell into disrepair.

Most of its original slate tiles were blown off in a tornado in 1974. They had been replaced with a composition roof, while a few tiles on the building's north side remained intact with the special cross formation that once decorated other roof sections .

Inside, the crucifix had caused the top slab of the marble altar beneath it to bow, so it needed to be replaced.

"As with any historical building, much of the deterioration results from water and moisture penetration," Fife said. "Moisture, partially from the roof damaged by the tornado in 1974, had destroyed the plaster on the chapel's interior. The walls had been replaced with drywall [and] were in terrible shape. In addition, the boxed guttering on the cornice had deteriorated, damaging the brick and mortar."

When the restoration is complete, the mortuary chapel will be a close reproduction of the original structure.